It would be nice if the spam could be filtered out, but really, do these people honestly think I'm going to buy a kitchen unit from Britain, from some unknown website?!?! If they had any brains, they'd realize I'm going to buy from a reputable company in my own community!

Hello, I've addressed the kitchen spam issue with our technical team. I try to check in each morning to delete the messages if there are any. I can ban those users, but they just keep creating new profiles that sneak through our filter. Will address it again and see if we can work toward a solution.Thank you for your patience,Tara

Well I did a 24 hr watch on this situation and they are not sneaking through your filter,the fact is the floodgates are wide open.Let me explain.Beginning at 8:30 AM yesterday (June26) I wrote down the number of members 64789.I then checked throughout the day and the numbers rose hourly.I checked back at 9:00 PM and the number of members was 64869.So in 12 and 1/2 hours there were 80 new members.You can tell by the user names these are spamers.So with that said,I am posting this at 10 AM(June 27) and now the number of members is 64959,which is 170 new members in a bit more than 24 hours.So of course this morning everything was spammed,as it will every morning,because of the high number of "members" they have,and it keeps going up by the hour.Sure you can ban the ones that post,but they have 100's more to keep this going. This is just a heads up that someone has to close the floodgates. lolHopefully this helps with this huge problem.

Thank you lilybulb, I will add this information to the bug ticket I filed with our technical team. I have asked if we can get all new members to enter captcha information when they join. Captcha text are all those weird letters and numbers you're asked to key in when entering contests, etc. They help to gather legitimate entries. I'm seeing if this is possible with our forum. A recommendation had been made to have to enter a captcha before any post, but I thought this might be a huge deterrent for our users...

Entering captcha data may be a lot less of a deterrent to a lot of members than surfing around the spam to look for legitimate posts of interest .. The best way of reducing or nearly eliminating spam is to have members apply for approval before being allowed to join ... but then either the tech team would have a lot more work to do vetting member applications or CG would have to give Tara an assistant to help take care of approving members. The tech team should go through the entire membership list and remove all the obvious spammer joins and the long time members with zero posts.. That would give a much truer view of how many members the forum really has. Somehow I really don't see any of that happening .

As I mentioned, I've raised the issue with our technical team. They work on all the company's sites, so it might take a bit of time. Thank you to all those in this thread who have provided constructive feedback. I understand the spam is a nuisance, but I really don't think it's hard to find the real gardening threads among a few kitchen messages each day. I have been going in each day to delete them, including today which is the Saturday of my long weekend. So, I apologize if the spam keeps getting through, yes, it's frustrating, but I am the one who fields the complaints in this forum and I've had enough.